1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to fuel cell sealing technology.
2. Background Art
A fuel cell is constituted, for example, by forming a gas diffusion layer on both surfaces of a membrane electrode assembly, and by sandwiching both of those ends with separators. With this type of fuel cell, various technologies have been developed for sealing the reaction gas supplied for fuel cell reactions with the membrane electrode assembly. For example, with Patent Document 1 noted below, disclosed is a fuel cell having a constitution for which at the circumference edge part between two facing separators, a sealing member is provided between the two separators, and the sealing member and separators are fit together. With this constitution, it is possible to suppress changes in sealing pressure due to variation in the size of the sealing member, and to improve the sealing performance.
However, with the technology of PTL1, to ensure sufficient sealing performance, a prerequisite was to clamp the fuel cell in the sandwiching direction with a relatively high clamp load. With the structural members of the fuel cell, it was necessary to have rigidity in accordance with the clamp load, so when the clamp load becomes high, this can lead to higher cost and larger size and the like of the fuel cell. Therefore, there was room for improvement regarding reduction of the clamp load.